​Background: Because soil salinity is a major abiotic
constraint affecting crop yield, much research has been conducted to
develop plants with improved salinity tolerance. Salinity stress impacts
many aspects of a plant’s physiology, making it difficult to study in toto.
Instead, it is more tractable to dissect the plant’s response into
traits that are hypothesized to be involved in the overall tolerance of
the plant to salinity. Scope and conclusions: We
discuss how to quantify the impact of salinity on different traits, such
as relative growth rate, water relations, transpiration, transpiration
use efficiency, ionic relations, photosynthesis, senescence, yield and
yield components. We also suggest some guidelines to assist with the
selection of appropriate experimental systems, imposition of salinity
stress, and obtaining and analysing relevant physiological data using
appropriate indices. We illustrate how these indices can be used to
identify relationships amongst the proposed traits to identify which
traits are the most important contributors to salinity tolerance.
Salinity tolerance is complex and involves many genes, but progress has
been made in studying the mechanisms underlying a plant’s response to
salinity. Nevertheless, several previous studies on salinity tolerance
could have benefited from improved experimental design. We hope that
this paper will provide pertinent information to researchers on
performing proficient assays and interpreting results from salinity
tolerance experiments.

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